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Films Reach Theaters a Drib Here, Drab There

LOS ANGELES — Nearly a month ago, the University of Wisconsin’s Badger Herald gave a rave to Ron Howard’s “Frost/Nixon,” calling it a “masterpiece that excels in all three areas of film’s holy trinity of acting, directing and writing.”

Maybe so. But if folks in Madison, Wis., were looking for a movie last weekend, they would have had more luck with the 2:45 matinee of “Bolt.”

“Frost/Nixon,” described far and wide as a favorite in the Oscar race, has yet to open in midsize cities with audiences as sophisticated as those in Madison, New Orleans or Tulsa, Okla.

Instead, Universal Pictures put the film in just three theaters on Dec. 5.

A week later “Frost/Nixon” slipped into three dozen more spots. It finally opened last weekend in 205 locations in the nation’s top 50 markets. But that was still fewer than half the number that played Mr. Howard’s Oscar-winning movie “A Beautiful Mind,” in what was viewed as a cautious debut when it was released in 2001.

This year’s movie awards season has played out like Oscar night at Minsky’s. At least a dozen of the supposedly hottest contenders — among them “The Wrestler,” from Fox Searchlight; “Milk,” from Focus Features; and “Revolutionary Road,” from Paramount Vantage and DreamWorks — are being teased out to the public in peekaboo release patterns.

That approach became especially common this year, as studios held many of their more serious movies until after the election. They then found themselves crowding into a marketplace that made a slow rollout look like the safest pattern even for some films, like “Frost/Nixon,” with big studios behind them. That sort of release is meant to build anticipation, by trading on good reviews and accumulating nominations from bellwether awards like the Golden Globes. It also allows a studio to hold back its big advertising buys until the audience is really ready to connect. But it can frustrate potential viewers who have been bombarded with information about movies they still cannot see.

“I’m surprised we don’t have ‘Revolutionary Road’; we usually do pretty well here,” said Sam Stephenson, a film buff and an instructor at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies in Durham, N.C.

Though it features Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, two of Hollywood’s biggest stars, “Revolutionary Road” was in just three theaters last weekend. Similarly, Mickey Rourke’s portrayal of a beaten-up battler in “The Wrestler,” the talk of the Toronto International Film Festival in September, had yet to play in more than about 15 locations as of last weekend.

Photo

Studios are creating pent-up viewer demand by staging big premieres and then showing new films in only a very few theaters.Credit
Nina Prommer/European Pressphoto Agency

Four years ago Warner Brothers unveiled “Million Dollar Baby,” which eventually won the best picture Oscar along with a directing award for Clint Eastwood, in an excruciatingly slow release that began with eight theaters in mid-December and did not reach most of the country until six weeks later.

The studio this year has dribbled out Mr. Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” — starting with just six theaters on Dec. 12, and fewer than a hundred by Christmas — even while widespread publicity has piqued the curiosity of an audience that will be largely unable to see the film until it moves to still more theaters on Jan. 9.

“You should see my e-mails,” Dan Fellman, Warner’s theatrical distribution president, said recently of the inevitable response by would-be viewers, many of whom find it hard to accept that New Yorkers and Angelenos should spend weeks with a big-star movie before it gets to their hometown malls.

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With “Frost/Nixon,” perhaps the most heavily promoted of the season’s trickling releases, Universal’s plan is to reach more screens when and if the movie picks up awards at the Golden Globes on Jan. 11, or Oscar nominations on Jan. 22.

The film has moved slowly because its appeal is more dependent on reviews and awards than the drawing power of its stars, Frank Langella and Michael Sheen. “This was a passion project,” said Adam Fogelson, Universal’s president for marketing and distribution.

That a certain number of people may be wondering where the movie is does not worry Mr. Fogelson. “If people are interested enough to ask those questions now, I suspect they’ll be interested when we bring it to the wider market,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday.

Still, some films are disappearing even before a slightly confused audience can find them.

For instance, Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” released in nine theaters in October by Sony Pictures Classics, expanded briefly to 119 locations, and then the number dwindled.

John Muller, a Yale Law School student who comes from Santa Monica, Calif., was hearing a lot about the film, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, weeks ago and went looking for it in the New Haven area, to no avail.